The Worst Librarian Ever

It’s time to tell the story of The Worst Librarian Ever.

Once upon a time, I was a new employee at Cornell University’s Olin Library. One of my first assignments was to tour the campus libraries and get a sense of the place. As you can imagine, campus library tours are not as popular as say, bong hits at the Tri Delts. Often the tour consisted of three or four people. One ill-fated day, the Olin Library tour consisted of one person: me.

Two of the library’s head muckeymucks guided the tour. One of them, a stern grey-haired woman, will heretofore be known as the Worst Librarian Ever.

The tour proceeded, and the three of us wandered through various rooms. I feigned interest in an array of statistics. Finally we reached a popular section of the library nicknamed The Cocktail Lounge, a white 1970’s style reading room filled with comfy chairs and tables arranged for group work. Students sat reading, listening to music, and talking.

I was relieved. Here at last was a comfortable space where the real life of the library took place, away from the fluorescent back-rooms of library administration. I wondered what people were reading. A buzz of conversation filled the room.

My tour guide kept up her spiel about circulation and holdings, until The Worst Librarian Ever suddenly cut her short. “Excuse me” she said, striding away from our small group. A lone student lay across two of the comfy chairs with a book on his chest. The comfy chairs, which I suspect were chosen for the express purpose of being comfy, had put him to sleep.

The Worst Librarian Ever leaned over the student and poked him awake. I watched in horror as he woke with a start to stare into her blazing eyes. The Worst Librarian Ever, pausing for effect, raised her finger, pointed and said in a voice so terrible its echo caused students in surrounding states to drop out of Library School:

“Take your feet off that chair RIGHT NOW young man!”

I winced. The entire room winced. The student took his feet down and put on his headphones. Conversation started up again. The earth continued to turn.

Five years in the future, three of the students in the room find themselves voting down a library millage but can’t quite explain why. Ten years in the future, the young man will be arrested for soliciting a dominatrix to flog him with rubber stamps. Five minutes in the future, I place an emergency call to my friend the Excellent Cornell Librarian.

She explains that the Olin library is open 24 hours. She mentions that The Worst Librarian Ever works an average of 8 hours per day, leaving 16 hours for students to stomp around on the furniture in whatever manner they wish. She confides that in addition to damaging the reputation of librarians to a roomful of future-influential ivy leaguers by loudly eviscerating a fellow student for a trivial infraction, The Worst Librarian Ever didn’t even work in that library.

She was just, you know, helping out.

Index This

Did you know that there is an American Society of Indexers? How meta is that?

In a similar vein, our fearless leaders here at the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds recently spearheaded the creation of an animal behavior ontology. I was browsing through the list of behaviors and have concluded that librarians are predisposed to aid-giving behavior, and perhaps homeostatic postures.

Designing for hyper-attentive cyborg children

cyhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.spell.gifborg childI got this in my email today:

What children can teach us: Lessons learned from the trenches of digital libraries“…developing digital libraries that support young people in querying, browsing, and reading scanned materials.”

It all sounds very impressive until you click the link. Look at that thing! It’s like getting stabbed in the eyeballs with suck! How can these people sleep at night?

This is a perfectly good children’s resource that is absolutely hidden from children. What is the focal point of the page? The word “Advanced” forgodsake. Why are there four search options? Do they actually think children care enough to distinguish between different search criteria? Who are these children? Can I have one?

I can’t even begin to list the mistakes they are making in this interface. Where is the content? I see three books. Why is there so much text? I don’t want to read that badly-formatted crap, and I’m a grown-up. Why is 98% of the navigation dedicated to links that are of absolutely no interest to children? Executive Summary? Yeah, my kid’s gonna click on that one. Why didn’t they hire a professional web designer? They make a huge deal about how kids “designed” the site, but they didn’t bother to honor those kids’ contributions by hiring a decent web developer. They’ve got more than 5 million dollars, they can afford it. In the time it took to write their complete curatorial policy (conveniently linked on the FRONT PAGE) they could have at least changed the default link color.

Once you actually find the content (just click “Simple Search” and chase the badly-written JavaScript pop-up around the screen until it works! It’s obvious! Cyborg children love to search!) the interface settles down a bit. The links related to the grant go away, and the library experiments with some innovative ways to find books, by color, length, etc. Good stuff. Except except except the graphics are so shitty and the labels are so poorly thought-out (“Real Animal Characters” rather than “Animals”, “Imaginary Animal Characters” rather than “Pretend Animals”) that it just all falls apart.

This site was designed for librarians, not for children.

another oneHumor me and compare it to nick.com (a favorite among the kids we researched in grad school). The big difference between the two is, on this site you can click absolutely anywhere and find something satisfying. You don’t even need to click. Information is conveyed by rollover sounds and animations. I’ve personally witnessed kids fight with each other over headphones in order to hear these sounds.

Look, I know I’m being an ass, and this is a great resource and these are good people and I’m going to get hate mail, but somebody has to say it.

It’s not enough that we are lovely librarians who care sooooo much about children. It’s not enough that we put all of this great content up on the interweb. It’s not enough that we are overworked researchers who will have to write tedious papers about the project to justify our tenure.

We need to run everything we do through a filter that asks: “If I click on this without a Master’s degree in Library Science, will it piss me off?” We need to acknowledge that design matters. We need to remove ourselves from our collections. We need to design websites that don’t mock the resources they contain. We need to do these things because otherwise all of our efforts are worthless. We need to design websites that don’t suck, because otherwise the kids that we care so much about are going to wander off and smoke crack. And it’s going to be our fault.

Primates and their tools.

Fellow library workers, let me engage you in a thought experiment.

Say you are changing the oxygen sensor in your aged vehicle with your friend Brian, and it is getting dark and has started raining and in spite of your best efforts you can’t get the old part off. As a librarian would you know enough NOT to stand in the rain and scrape your knuckles trying to remove the heat shield from your exhaust manifold?

As research professionals, I’m sure you would quickly wash your hands, search the web, and discover that the auto parts store sells a tool clearly labeled “Oxygen Sensor Socket Wrench” which will remove the old part posthaste.

At least this is what you would do if you were not me.

Hey! Look! More Snow!

Hey! Look! More Snow!

I’ve been back at work for a while, but have been too exhausted from my vacation to write about everything. Here’s a little recap. But first, this:

Cell phone use was apparently a problem at some point here in the library. I can’t imagine why, since the giant slabs of asbestos prevent anything resembling decent reception. Anyway, the main stairway has been designated a “Cell Phone Zone” where, supposedly, students and staff are to stand enjoying echo-y conversations amplified and overheard by six floors of potential eavesdroppers. Today on the way upstairs I noticed a bit of graffiti above the cell phone zone sign. In grand geeky college tradition, someone has designated the stairway the “Self-Hone Zone.”

Which would be great, of course. There should be more of this. The library could establish a whole suite of self-improvement locations. Meditation rooms built off of the lunchroom, consciousness-raising areas outside of circulation, friendly councilors scattered throughout the stacks. The self-hone zone is only a beginning.

Right. Anyway. So over the break, I drove the eight hours to Flint, spent a restless night in my drafty old high school bedroom surrounded by the ham radio equipment and computer magazines that have taken my place, then flew down to Austin, TX for xmas with my boyfriend’s parents, who are majorly sweet. I met him on his layover in the Detroit airport and we flew down together. Apparently the flu had struck him in the airport shuttle, and by the time we met up, he was a tired, feverish pile of carry-on bags. Christmas was spent in the Austin Emergency clinic, waiting for an antibiotic prescription.

I was felled a few hours later, and most of my stay in lovely lovely warm not-snowy-at-all-Austin was spent in a darkened room drinking tea and comparing thermometer readings. We did make it to San Antonio on our last day, and ate at a famous Mexican restaurant where the entrees consisted almost entirely of lard. At the San Antonio zoo, I met the Giant Anteater and spent almost an hour hanging around outside his habitat, which was probably the most ant-free spot in Texas, watching him sniff around with his giant ant-sniffing nose. He came up and sniffed me a couple of times, which pretty much made my week.

After Austin, I flew back to Michigan and hung out with my parents for a while. My friend Erin was in town from San Francisco, and not wanting to get hit in the crossfire of a Flinttown New Years Eve, we hopped in my car and drove to downtown Chicago, where we were much safer. I spent two solid days at the Lincoln Park Zoo, which you may think is a bit excessive, but I do not. On both days, I was pecked by an ostrich. Or rather, the glass that I was standing in front of was pecked by an ostrich. The ostrich would walk by, see us standing there watching him, come over and peck the glass in an irritated way, then walk off. This happened several times. After awhile I realized that the ostrich, having a rather short bird-memory, probably thought that each time it pecked at us was the first. He was trapped in an endless loop of “La de da, here I am, walking, HEY! Get out of here! HA! Take That! La de da…”

Hey, for any of you designers out there, the American Ostrich Association (AOA) really needs a new website.

Anyway, after Chicago, Erin and I drove back to the Crater that is Flint, spent some more family time, and I drove home.

New Year’s resolutions include:

Getting to work earlier. Which, of course, means leaving work earlier. It was getting pretty depressing leaving at six and six thirty. I’ve started coming in at 7:30 with the secretaries, and I think I’m getting more work done in the quiet.

Gym getting-to. This too has been quite successful. My friend Kim and I have a pact. We go every day at lunch rain or shine. We’ve had to miss two days due to dangerously cold windchill (-25F! Come to Ithaca!), but other than that we’ve been faithful. I’ve felt really great doing this. It’s like having recess in the middle of the day. And it is much more memorable than curling up with a book in the lunchroom.

More cooking, less of the conveniently located Indian restaurant. Say no more. Mmm, saag paneer…

Some library stories

We were walking around on our lunch break yesterday and found a really big feather. Next to the feather was a squirrel. By using Occam’s Razor, we determined that we had found a squirrel feather, and spent the rest of lunch trying to convince the reference department.

I got an email yesterday from a nice person who was curious about what exactly “library research” involves. Well, you know that little webcam on top of your computer? It only LOOKS like it’s turned off. Mwah-ha-ha-ha! Ha! Heh! Heh. ahem.

Library Tourism, Ithaca

The weekend was so good that it took me until Tuesday to write about it. With a full serving of book-shopping, horse-petting and firework-ogling,  I luxuriated my way around Ithaca, reveling in the not-work.

I discovered that libraries can be found in the most surprising places. The bird sanctuary where the beavers live also houses a new audio and video library, complete with some very hip compact shelving and an enormous AV-lab. I saw a huge turtle from the window outside their reading room, so I am now a big fan.

Chess with the President, Bake Sales

We were playing chess at the co-op picnic this weekend, when I got the chance to do a nice rant to locally-famous Green party presidential candidate Paul Glover on the subject of librarianship, digital preservation, and last-ditch measures for funding our local library.

Millages seem to be kind of a Michigan thing. Perhaps a bake sale is in order?

Brownies, only $500 each! Anybody up for mom’s million-dollar cheesecake? Only a million dollars!